Ask-A-Linguist Message Details

Subject:

Usage of 'with' without an object

Question:

Recently I've noticed (in published fiction no less) sentences like this: ''She asked him if he wanted to come with.'' No, not a typo, just ''come with''. This is not a character's speech but the narrator using this. Is this a regional usage? When did this start becoming accepted usage that passes muster with an editor? Thank you!

Reply:

That's interesting. My first wife, who was an American and whom I married in 1975, regularly used "with" this way in speech. To me it sounded very strange in English (though it would be perfectly normal in German -- but there was nothing German in her background). It sounds as though she was perhaps an early adopter of a usage which has spread so that it is accepted as normal even by some editors in the USA (I am assuming you were reading an American book), but it certainly isn't in Britain.
Geoffrey Sampson